Mariani, Paul. Gerard Manley Hopkins: a Life.

New York City: Viking Adult, 2008

Reviewed by Ted Witham

The 13th century Franciscan philosopher Duns Scotus  was one of Gerard Manley Hopkins’ heroes.  Duns Scotus invented  the idea of haecceitas.  This ugly Latin word is usually translated by the equally ugly   ”isness ", but would be better rendered as "uniqueness." Haecceitas refers to the quality that makes a thing itself and not anything else.  In other words, Scotus was encouraging his readers to gaze at things until they disclosed their unique quality.  Gazing, according to Sister Ilia Delio  among others, is a characteristic aspect of Franciscan praying. Duns Scotus' philosophy places him firmly in this Franciscan tradition.

Hopkins pays homage to Duns Scotus in his poem “Duns Scotus's Oxford." This sonnet deplores the way Oxford has developed and grown since the 1200s.

“... graceless growth, thou hast confounded

Rural rural keeping - folk, flocks, and flowers.”

Hopkins has evidently informed this judgement by gazing at the buildings and trees he so loves until he sees what makes Oxford unique.

 “Towery city and branchy between towers;

Cuckoo-echoing, bell-swarmèd, lark-charmèd, rook-racked, river-rounded.”

Hopkins was expert at gazing.  Ilia Delio tells the story of Hopkins gazing at a tree in Ireland for three days until it disclosed its haecceitas.  Hopkins felt at home in the natural world of Ireland and Wales. It is this world, gazed at and wondered about, that is "charged with the glory of God.”

Paul Mariani's biography reveals that Hopkins’ expertise was profound but narrow.  His powerful intellect was trained at Oxford in the classics, and he remained absorbed in Latin and Greek even after the Jesuits had thoroughly trained him in theology. 

 The Jesuits seemed not to know what to do with this strange, intense young man, so they eventually sent him to Ireland on the pretext that he would help other Jesuits establish a Catholic University in Dublin.  Even though he was on the Catholic side, Ireland was not a congenial place for an English patriot, especially one who found it difficult to make friends. In practice, his lonely years in Ireland were an almost endless task marking the Latin and Greek exams of all the children matriculating in Ireland.

Depressed and physically ill, he battled on until his death in 1888 aged only 44.  

He cried out, presumably in the mid-1880s:

My own heart let me more have pity on; let

Me live to my sad self hereafter, kind,

Charitable; not live in this tormented mind.

With this tormented mind, tormenting yet.

Only hours before his death, Father Wheeler heard Hopkins whispering over and over again, "I am so happy.  I am so happy."    Mariani’s simple telling of this story leaves us with the impression that Hopkins is finally happy because he knows he will soon be passing from this unhappy life to his glorious reward.

Mariani’s Life is richly textured.  The biographer gathers a mass of detail and tells the story of Hopkins’ life chronologically.   His sources are so detailed that he often reports verbatim conversations that Hopkins had on a given day, and records what he was thinking and confiding to his journal.

Hopkins’ story is simple. From the English upper-middle class, Hopkins would have been expected to remain lifelong Anglican were it not for his awkward conversion to Rome. This choice, made at Oxford, determined his direction.

It was a time when young Oxford men agonised over ‘going over’: John Henry Newman, another of his heroes, had done it a generation earlier, and several of Hopkins’ circle either converted or seriously contemplated it. It was a decision to be made, as Hopkins did, with lengthy deliberation and careful disclosure to family and friends. Some never forgave or understood his decision.

His lifelong friendship with the poet Robert Bridges only just lasted this decision time.

Hopkins did well enough at his theological studies, and loved the setting of the Jesuit Novitiate at Roehampton, Wales. His daily walks inspired his poetry; he learned Welsh to better minister to Welsh-speakers; and he regaled his fellows with erudite jokes at end of term dinners. He was happy – or at least as happy as he would ever be.

His engagement with the craft of poetry started to flower at Roehampton. Paul Mariani shows how original Hopkins was both in developing the idea of ‘sprung rhythm’ and in paying attention to ‘inscape’. These are both complex ideas, and Mariani helped me understand them better.

Hopkins’ concept of ‘inscape’ is the poetical descendent of Duns Scotus’ haecceitas. Where landscape is exterior, ‘inscape’ is interior. It describes the qualities revealed when you gaze on something in nature or on the action of a person. Poetry is partly about capturing inscape, as a painter, in depicting trees and sky, communicates the qualities of the landscape.

Hopkins deeply understood the contribution Shakespeare had made to poetry and to the English language by adapting iambic pentameter to English poetry in both drama and poems. Hopkins believed that English is not a syllabic language, and questioned whether iambs and dactyls and other syllabic patterns were best for English. So he experimented with a line of five beats – still a pentameter – that was independent of the number of syllables: this was sprung rhythm.

Mariani explores at some depth the influence of Duns Scotus on Hopkins.  In a book of over 400 pages, I was a little disappointed not to find more about another influence: Ignatius of Loyola. I felt Paul Mariani played down the Jesuits’ influence of Hopkins. However, there is no way that a sensitive man like Hopkins could have completed the 40 day Exercises without being deeply permeated by Ignatian spirituality. Mariani may have thought that David Downes in his study on the Ignatian spirit and Hopkins  had sufficiently covered the notion of Hopkins the priest-poet.

While still in simple vows, the Jesuits put Hopkins into a classroom. He taught zealously, and students remembered him as gentle and trustworthy.

They would surely remember his illustration of how Achilles hooked Hector’s bloodied corpse behind his chariot and dragged it beneath the walls of Troy. “Hopkins lay on his back and had a student drag him around the floor.” (p. 333) His zany pedagogy sometimes connected with his students, but more often than not, his students simply found him over-scrupulous and strange. Teaching was not his vocation.

Meanwhile, Hopkins struggled on with his craft: sprung rhythm and internal rhymes pressed into service to express his insight into the true nature of the world around him. Not that Hopkins was always convinced that being a poet was the heart of his vocation. He stopped writing for some years, disappointed that he was not being published, and unsure of what his superiors really thought of his poetry.

And so to Ireland, and to the lonely room with the desk piled high with papers to mark, and the daily walk his only escape.

We might be tempted to conclude that he had lived the life of the archetypical Romantic poet: the genius whose suffering was transmuted into Art. This was the ideal that Byron, Keats, Coleridge and others proposed. 

Yet I doubt Hopkins would want to be placed with the Romantics. Every day, he might say, he had the privilege of seeing  the ‘dearest freshness deep down things’, and though to the observer, his life may seem to carry the shape of the Crucified Lord, Hopkins knew every day the presence of the Risen Lord: ‘Enough! the Resurrection,// A heart’s clarion! Away grief’s gasping, joyless days, dejection.’  This disciple was not waiting for the after-life to taste the joys of life in the Risen One. He was enchanted by it now.

For this lover of Hopkins’ poetry, this life was not only fascinating to read, but it was also good to hold such a beautiful book.  The narrative is sustained with clarity over 435 pages, and a handful of illustrations add much it.  I found myself often looking back to the photos of the young Bridges and Hopkins taken in 1863, and used as a pictorial epigraph for Part 1, and then flicking forward to the photos taken in 1888 months before Hopkins' death in Dublin.  These show that Bridges as a mature man with a vital eye looking forward to the future.  Hopkins, by contrast, looks exhausted and grim, with his hair receding and his head tilted slightly backwards as though he already looking up in anticipation.

Mariani has captured for me the haecceitas of Father Gerard Manley Hopkins, priest and poet.  Mariani's inscape is an insight into his intense, short life.